Textual Watch

Widget for Textual Framework that emulates the watch shell command

This is an offshoot from a side-project where I needed to build a quick TUI using the Textual library to pipe output from several shell commands into a few widgets in the terminal.

Suggestions and feedback is welcome here, feel free to open a PR or raise an issue for further discussion.

Installation

Clone this repo and install it locally with pip:

$ git clone https://github.com/BlakeJC94/textual-watch
$ cd textual_watch
$ pip install .

Quickstart

To write a simple app to monitor disk usage, we can write a simple disk space monitor with the following in a simple python script:

# spaced.py
from textual.app import App
from textual.widgets import Placeholder

from textual_watch import WatchShell


class Demo(App):
    async def on_mount(self) -> None:
        widget = WatchShell(
            "df -h",
            interval=3.0,
            title="current disk space",
        )
        await self.view.dock(widget, edge="left", size=100)

    async def on_load(self, event):
        await self.bind("q", "quit")


Demo.run()

Run the script $ python3 spaced.py to see the output. Press q to close the TUI (since the command is executed asynchronously on another thread, there's no delay in registering key presses).